HTML::TableExtract doesn't work

Question

The input html is attached (my $file), With the following script, I cannot extract the table I want. Any suggestions?

use strict;
use warnings;
use HTML::TableExtract;

my $file="view-source_www.nasdaq.com_dividend-stocks_dividend-calendar.aspx_date=2017-Apr-19.html";
open DATA,$file || die "cannot";

my $content;
{
    local $/ = undef; # slurp mode
    $content = <DATA>;
}
close DATA;

my $te;
$te = HTML::TableExtract->new( headers => [qw(Announcement_Date)] );
$te-> parse($content);

# Examine all matching tables
foreach my $ts ($te->tables) {
  print "Table (", join(',', $ts->coords), "):\n";
  foreach my $row ($ts->rows) {
     print join(',', @$row), "\n";
  }
}

Answer 1

Two problems here.

Firstly, as jcaron points out in a comment, you're not parsing the right thing. You seem to be parsing a "view source" page. You need to get the HTML directly. You can do that with LWP::Simple.

use LWP::Simple;

my $url = 'http://www.nasdaq.com/dividend-stocks/dividend-calendar.aspx?date=2017-Apr-19';

my $content = get $url;

Running your code now gives no errors but, unfortunately, it gives no output either. That's because you're defining the headers argument to the object constructor incorrectly. You use qw(Announcement_Date) but there is no table header with the value "Announcement_Date", so no matching table is found.

If you change the constructor call to this:

$te = HTML::TableExtract->new( headers => ['Announcement Date'] );

Then you get the expected output.